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In Which I Purchase a Laughably Cheap Fiddle From the Internet
21 Jan, 2009
My friend Jason e-mailed me out of the blue last week to inform me he had purchased a $25 violin kit from ebay.
The one time I inquired casually as to what one might expect to pay for a good quality, entry-level violin kit (instrument, bow, case, accoutrements) at Stamell Stringed Instruments I was given a figure in the $700 dollar range - that was for a Pacific Rim import, professionally set up, that you wouldn’t outgrow as soon as you learn how to play Boil Them Cabbage Down.
Despite that point of reference, and personal experience bearing out that you really should begin with the best instrument you can afford, that $25 figure really got under my skin. Much like the time I bought a $25 ukulele, I gave in to temptation because at that price there’s really nothing to lose. I expect that the instrument headed my way is complete rubbish, and that I’ll be doing myself a disservice by trying to learn how to play on it, but we’ll see. In the meantime I’ll be lurking at http://fiddlehangout.org.
Durang's Hornpipe (clawhammer banjo)
Bones Module: Development Release for Drupal 6
1 Jan, 2009
The initial release of the Bones Module for Drupal 6 is now available at http://drupal.org/project/bones. Functionally it is more or less identical to the original Drupal 5 release, with updates to the internal Menu API code.
The Bones Module facilitates rapid site wireframing by importing YAML outlnes.
Building out Drupal module interfaces with a stub function
22 Dec, 2008
A technique that I’m finding quite useful during module development is to create a “stub” function for use as a generic interface callback for menu items that I want to define, but haven’t yet written callbacks for. For example, if I were building a Drupal 5 module called widgetmaster, I would define:
Searching the Drupal Database by Regular Expression
18 Dec, 2008
I found myself wanting to use regular expressions to find some imported Drupal nodes containing broken old image paths. Naturally, I went looking for a module that might accommodate me and I did find the Scanner module. Unfortunately the site I was working with is in Drupal 6, and I didn’t have the time to work on a Drupal 6 port of what looks like a pretty sophisticated module just to find a few nodes.
GMail Aliases for Testing Multiple Drupal User Registrations
4 Dec, 2008
One of GMail’s handier features that people are still surprised to learn about is the ability to make multiple, unique address aliases on the fly.
If your GMail address is example@gmail.com, emails sent to example+user1@gmail.com, example+user2.gmail.com, example+admin@gmail.com will all go to the root example@gmail.com address.
Modifying CCK fieldgroups with hook_form_alter()
1 Dec, 2008
I was writing a module to conditionally hide a fieldset on a CCK node editing form based on whether the user is logged in or not, and for a while I was very puzzled as to why my custom module’s implementation of hook_form_alter wasn’t seeing any of the fieldsets defined by the CCK fieldgroup module.
I searched Google for the terms ‘cck fieldset hook_form_alter’, which led me to a helpful tip from Benjamin Melançon:
Introducing the Bones module for Drupal: Rapid Site Wireframing with YAML
23 Nov, 2008
When I first started using Drupal a year and a half ago one of the first things that struck me about building out sites (that is, sites consisting primarily of Primary Links pointing at Page nodes) was that it building out a skeletal wireframe of a site gets tedious, especially if you have a lot of "static" pages; we’re all familiar with the drill:
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